Billing systems for mobile telecommunication units have traditionally been designed on the assumption that all calls were being made while mobile, and that standard land-line telephones would be used whenever possible to garner reduced phone rates. However, cell phone providers have now largely achieved high coverage, and are switching their attention away from building cell infrastructure to plugging coverage holes, increasing revenues from installed infrastructure, and increasing capacity at heavily used cells.
Billing systems in these mobile telecommunications systems presently do not provide an incentive for customers to place or receive calls from a specified geographic location. That is, billing within a telecommunications system is generally ubiquitous. A common billing system in a mobile telecommunications system might charge a mobile user a flat fee per minute of voice airtime. Another common billing system is to charge users a monthly fee, with which is included an allotment of minutes, beyond which the user must pay an additional fee per minute. Yet another common billing system is to allow multiple mobile users to share commonly owned minutes. For example, a husband and wife may each have their own mobile phone, but they share from a common monthly allotment of minutes, and only receive one bill from the mobile telecommunications provider.
As mobile telecommunications systems are becoming more advanced, a mobile unit's geographic location may be used to provide location-based services (LBS). That is, mobile telecommunications devices that are presently available and under development by various companies include Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities. In addition to GPS, mobile telecommunications service providers may use a network-based geographic location system to determine the position of a mobile unit. Examples of such network-based methods include time difference of arrival (TDOA) systems and angle of arrival (AOA) systems, among others. Mobile Telephones or other mobile telecommunications devices that include GPS capability, or mobile telephones (or other devices) used in a telecommunications system that can use a network-based method to determine its location, are herein referred to as location-enabled mobile units. The advent of location-enabled mobile units provides a new capability around which services may be designed.
Previous known billing systems have included the use of rate zones associated with locations defined by a user. For example, a known system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,802 (Tell, et al.) teaches using rate zones linked to an individual, such as his or her home or business. In this known system, the user defines predetermined sites that he or she frequents and is charged low rates for usage at these locations, whereas other locations have a premium rate charged. This encourages a user to use a mobile phone even when at home if mobile phone rates in the “at home” zone are comparable to rates charged for land line use, or are covered under an unlimited blanket monthly charge, etc. The infrastructure support for a user at home is no different, however, than the support for that same user walking down the street several blocks from home—it is only the rate being charged that differs. What is considered a “home” zone with low rates for one user is generally considered a “mobile” zone with high rates for other users. This may tend to influence people's behavior to increase cell phone usage in generally predictable ways as an alternative to available land-line telephones, and does not involve any changes to infrastructure other than the addition of a location-sensitive billing capability.
Another known location-based billing system is where a mobile telecommunications company agrees to give free or heavily discounted usage to a certain class of users in exchange for permission to erect a cell base station. For example, employees of a company might be given free cell phone use for all calls handled by a cell base station erected on top of that company's building in exchange for the cell phone company being permitted to erect that same base station. This location-based system, however, does not provide an incentive to users to place or receive mobile telephone calls from any location other than from the area covered by the erected cell base station.
In present mobile telecommunications environments, there is no means known in the art to provide an incentive to place or receive a mobile telephone call or use a mobile telecommunications data service from a dynamically specified geographic location defined by someone other than the user. Thus, an improved system is needed that can provide this capability, determine the location of a MU, and charge the user or owner of the mobile unit a selective fee based on the location at which the MU is located.